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Let's rotate the policy back to a slow revolution

Geoff Lawson

IN LIGHT of the recent trumpeting of Shane the Sheikh's imminent return from the disco-ball stage of Twenty20 to the full blastfurnace of Test cricket, the major debate in Australian cricket has shifted tangentially.

Where the furious debates recently have focused on the form and placement of the batsmen and the form, fitness and rotation (sore hamstrings, torn toenails and overuse of the hair dryer) of the pace battery, the spotlight now goes in search of Australia's spin successors. The South African series was earmarked by the speed of Dale Steyn, the bounce of Morne Morkel and the swerving accuracy of Vernon Philander. The Australians perceived pace and seam as their strongest counter weapon if only they could find a fuse that hadn't been overworked or frayed at the ends.

The Sri Lankan series will be characterised by a slower tempo. The visitors will have respectable medium pace that will curve the new ball and test techniques, but not timing. The game plan will be to make big scores on the back of Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene and an explosive Tillakaratne Dilshan.

With Lasith Malinga consigned to the tinsel heap of the Big Bash League, there is no fright in the Sri Lankan snarl, just clever spinners who will need not just a pile of runs to work behind, but some pitches that brown and grip. That possibility is unlikely.

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The false dawn of the Australian fast bowling resurgence has masked the complementary skill set deficiency of the local tweakers. Australia will not win in India without quality across-the-board, but especially quality spin. India has proved fallible against spin on its own dung heap as the resurgent Monty Panesar and world No. 1 spinner Graeme Swann won a brilliant victory in Mumbai. The scuttlebutt around the rehydrating dispenser is England may well prepare some bunsen burners for the Ashes in response to Monty and Swanny's dominance. The debate about the efficacy of the English Duke ball may be redundant. But does Australia have the slow men to do a job against quality batting?

Nathan Lyon is the incumbent, a callow member of the spinners brotherhood with a grand total of 31 first-class matches, including 16 Tests. He was unable to bowl Australia to a victory on day five at his home ground of Adelaide, mostly because he had never bowled his state to a win on a crumbling final day of a shield game. There's not much he can do about that, he was picked on a whim by ''talent identifiers'' after a handful of matches and is engaged in ''on-the-job training''.

The talent blokes are the same ones who are taking teenage spinners and putting them in first-class cricket or giving them contracts before they have ever taken a five-wicket haul in a club match. Those very same chaps, and some are now ex-talent spotters, have given brief trials to Jason Krejza, Michael Beer, Steve Smith, Steve O'Keefe, Brad Hogg, Cameron White, Beau Casson, Nathan Hauritz, Xavier Doherty, Dan Cullen, and possibly John Howard if he ever landed one of his infamous offies. All of these players were never given time to develop, to learn the hard way, to learn what ''experience'' entails. In modern parlance it is the guts of ''skill acquisition''.

They were taken from age group cricket and shot into an unsustainable orbit. When they should have been bowling a trillion overs in club matches and getting flayed to all parts, they were playing artificially constructed, future league games against fellow teenage battlers or unwrapping their new Australia tracksuit for whatever tour was departing that week.

Rangana Herath has played 207 first-class games and taken 780 wickets, 174 in Tests. Between Lyon, Beer, Doherty, Krejza, Smith and O'Keefe, in total there is 216 matches for 488 victims. Suraj Randiv has another 90 matches and 395 wickets to add to the ''experienced'' bowling.

Granted Sri Lankan first-class cricket will offer more turning pitches than Australia, but it would be nice for our spinners to have a decent track record of even modest length before they were thrown in the deep and dusty end. Young leg-spinners such as Cameron Boyce and Adam Zampa need cuddling, patience and a dose of tough love all in the same package. Wrist spin has been such an integral ingredient of Australian cricket success over the years it would be nice to have a couple of prospects plying their trades in Sheffield Shield for a year or several.

The legacy left by Warne has turned downhill because he set the benchmark so ridiculously high.

Sheffield Shield matches at Hobart this summer and last have been dominated by seamers, but that has been more to do with an underprepared and irregular surface which rewards lottery entrants rather than skilful players. The Test pitch is likely to be more reliable than the state surfaces. The Australian batsmen will face the new menace of slowness and loop; early on you may see Ed Cowan and Dave Warner getting through their strokes early. It will be good practice for India.